“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them”
This amazing definition of leadership coaching by Timothy Gallwey is all a great leader must acknowledge. We know that in a workforce, the management often chooses a few employees and forms a team to achieve a particular goal.
However, it might so happen that there can emerge conflicts among them and this will hinder achieving the desired goal. More so, the organizations often decide to coach a few chosen workforce for the company’s upliftment. However, coaching the team instead of just a few individuals comes with a lot of benefits. Team coaching fosters collective efficiency and a collaborative mindset among the team members.
What do you mean by Team Coaching?
So, what is team coaching in the first place? You might have heard about coaching the employees in a company who deserve it. But, have you ever realized that others in the team might also deserve equal coaching to be competent?
Skilled employees for a common goal are often put in a single team to elevate the performance of a company. However, that often backfires owing to conflicts among team members. Each team member tries to establish their competence in an individualistic approach. However, the need of the hour is to promote a collaborative effort. This is where team coaching is of utmost importance.
Team coaching is an approach that aims to bring in the attitude for collaborative work to heighten the performance of the team as a whole. This eventually leads to an increase in productivity. Team coaching brings in a greater interaction among team members. Irrespective of their attitude and behavior, they learn to appreciate each other’s strengths and weaknesses to the best of the team's efficiency. Team members become team players.
When these seasoned team players come together after receiving team coaching, they work towards attaining a collective goal. Here, a leader plays a pivotal role. A leader needs to cater to the individual needs of the team members to drive them towards working for a common cause - better team performance and hence the organization.
Leadership coaching proves to be successful at this point for the leader of a team. Team coaching improves the working environment, developing the bond between teammates. Furthermore, team coaching in a workplace helps in boosting morale, promoting stability, and scales up the productivity graph for the organization’s good. Team coaching fosters collective awareness within the teammates, no matter how different they are from each other.
What’s the aim of Team Coaching
Team coaching is the partnership between team members and the leader with regards to how they manage the work together, how they complement each other, and how they interact with each other. It’s about working in unison, managing conflicts, and working towards a common goal. The primary motive for team coaching is a particular goal customized for a team.
In team coaching, the entire team is mentored together keeping in mind the common purpose of the team. Team coaching fosters a coaching mindset and establishes and maintains agreements between team members, team leaders and stakeholders. The team coach highlights the elementary differences between team coaching and other team development modalities. It profoundly cultivates trust and promotes team purpose as a single entity.
With team coaching, the team players learn to improve their listening skills - listening to other members in a team is of utmost importance to work for a common purpose. Further, a reputed and experienced team coach ensures that team coaching evokes awareness and establishes ethical working practices. The coach ensures that team members identify team goals and take the necessary steps to achieve these goals.
7 Building Blocks For Team Coaching
Effective team coaching is grounded on 7 basic rules - Goals, Roles, Rules, Building trust, Managing conflicts, Open communication and Celebration. These are the foundation for a successful team coaching process. Such core blocks help create a space for all team members where they interpret and comprehend these foundation bricks of team coaching. Team coaching process lets team members understand these essential aspects and learn how to work towards a common goal.
How is team coaching important in modern working conditions?
When there are talented professionals, they can of course work as a collective strength for a company. It motivates them to transform a creative idea into reality. With inspiring and effective team coaching, an organization can help its employees in several ways:
- Strengthening collaboration: In a working environment, it is all about either task work (individual effort) or teamwork (collective effort). While the former shows individual performance, the latter is all about promoting the performance of a team. With team coaching, an environment of support and collaborative work is built by the team leader who understands the problems and finds feasible solutions for the other team players. When the team knows that their team leader is open to suggestions and makes room for mistakes as well, they get the strength to think creatively and constructively.
- Promoting appreciation: An organization needs to promote appreciation of the strong points of each team member. Through team coaching, the team members acknowledge the plus points of their peers and hold respect for it. No wonder, it boosts confidence within the team. In a set-up where individuals work separately, it becomes very difficult to recognize and appreciate these positive qualities. When the constructive qualities of a member improves and every member focuses on strengthening their strong points, they perform better. The connection among them grows strong and gets better with productive results.
- Raising collective awareness: As is often seen in a working environment, when a team starts a new project, the energy level of the members is at its highest. Everyone is too excited to start a new plan and this goes on for a few days until everything extremely slows down. However, with team coaching, the spirit is always high. The team players take the ownership and responsibility of a project and assist one another to ensure smooth release. This leads to more awareness among members who work together and develop the talent of dealing with sudden challenges that crop up as the deadline nears.
Amazing Benefits of Team Coaching
- Employees feel valued: When a leader values his employee and when employees feel that they are important to the organization, they perform better. Team coaching promotes this sense of being valued. This makes them stay loyal to the company instead of thinking about quitting and shifting to some other organization.
- Better team performance: With team coaching from a certified team coach, the performance surely improves. This is one of the most important qualities and benefits of team coaching. To complement the benefits of team coaching, leadership coaching is essential. Leadership coaching helps a leader recognize the weak and strong points of his team members. Hence, with professional team and leadership coaching, the leader and his/her team flourishes and grows together.
- Effective communication: Team coaching promotes transparent and honest communication between leader and team mates as well as among the team players. It’s all about reciprocation. The team members feel comfortable speaking their minds and ideas to their peers and leader. This will leave no scope for any miscommunication, eventually resulting in a better understanding between the employees and with the team leader.
- Welcome changes for good: With advanced technology and changing times, it becomes necessary sometimes to adapt to changes for the better. Many employees are stern towards adaptability. They are in denial of changes and do not like improving over traditional ways of working. However, team coaching drives a friendly attitude and welcoming nature within a team. This in turn improves the relationship between the teammates and helps them achieve their target on time.
- Identify weaknesses: There can be natural conflicts within a team where peers might not recognize the weaknesses of each other. Team coaching will enable them to accept the weaknesses and work towards helping one another. It’s about complimenting each other’s skills and not promoting rivalry.
- Comprehensive planning: Team coaching is often connected to a term called OCTAPACE Assessment. Author Hiba Zaidi talks about OCTAPACE in detail as organizational culture is the DNA of any workplace. It covers eight aspects of a team’s positive and weak points:
- Openness- sharing of ideas and thoughts among team members
- Confrontation- facing challenges and finding solutions
- Trust- trust between members and the leader
- Authenticity- in sharing their thoughts and feelings
- Proactive- members taking initiative, preplanning, and precautions
- Autonomy- freedom of expressing and using their authority
- Collaboration- members work together to solve each other’s problems
- Experimentation- using new techniques and approaches to solve issues
Team coaching definition -
Dr Paras defines Team coaching as a “collaborative venture between team coach, team leaders and team members. The team coach partners with the team and works towards a single team purpose where he/she creates better psychological safety and ensures inclusion, respect and collaboration between every member in the group. Here, the team is considered as one entity functioning for a common goal”.
Team coach promotes the entire team to function as a whole towards a specific aim by empowering the members with, vision, resources and intra-team relationships. Team coaches stimulate teams to fulfil short-term team goals before working towards the next one. This is a highly effective approach to foster the elevated performance of the team as a whole for the organization.
Let’s understand through a real-life workplace example. If there is a significant project which needs to be worked on for the company and needs team members of different skills to be put together under it. Here, resources from various teams having specific abilities to execute the project are put together. Team coaching is of immense importance to nurture the team working spirit in this newly formed group to work towards that significant project coming up soon.
Team coaches cultivate that sense of oneness and unity and acknowledge the differences among the members. The team members are geared up to envision the team's purpose as their common goal and work towards it by complementing each other's strengths and competencies.
Dr Paras is a highly experienced mentor in Team coaching and he followed his unique approach based on a framework of 7 building blocks which includes -
- Goals
- Roles
- Rules
- Building trust
- Managing conflicts
- Open communication and
- Celebration.
Team Building vs. Team Development vs. Team Coaching
Have you ever realized that these three are not synonymous? Yeah, they do sound similar, but there are critical differences between each of them.
Coming to the differences between each, let’s understand that through a small comparison table.
| Team Building | Team Development | Team Coaching | |
| The process | This is planned through different activities to create an awareness of team work | This is planned through conversation where team leaders and members try out with different models and frameworks for team work | Team coach partners with team leaders and team members to work towards a unified goal |
| Motto | Awareness | Education | Execution |
| Benefits | This is the simplest way towards creating the awareness of teamwork | Team leaders get opportunities to try out different ways to manage their team conflicts and build better communication with each other | Teams apply the best way for a single purpose of the team and works as one entity |
| Audience | 30-300 | 12-15 | 8-10 |
| Drawbacks | This is not very effective to inculcate the team working spirit as a single entity as the activities are short-lived | There is no unified team purpose towards which the team works. Only conversation and testing of different team work plans happens in team development. | As team coaching needs every member to sit face to face to work in unison, this process faces setbacks when team members are located in different parts of the world. If the teams are not inducted well for the team coaching process, this process often fails. |
The way a for team can function effectively is effectively work is to club all three or two for better functioning of the team together. Dr Paras has years of experience in customizing team coaching plans according to the requirements of the teams. He has combined team building/team development and team coaching together to make the team work more robust.
Team coaching is extremely rewarding. As the team works together and grows through team building, team facilitation and team coaching, it becomes an integrating lovely experience to observe success coming for the organization as a whole. Such a mindset garners growth for individual team members as well. When the teammates learn, adjust, and evolve together, bright ideas of working come to the forefront.
If your organization is facing difficulty in managing teams with employees of mixed mindsets emotions, Team coaching and leadership training can certainly help. Coach Dr Paras is a leading life coach who has empowered many team managers and teams to work successfully within an organization. Dr Paras is well-known for guiding the team leads in inculcating the right skills to be true leaders to be efficacious for the team members and the organization. They are all placed as top team leads in some of the most recognized organizations.
Dr Paras has his own unique process of executing team coaching, Team development and team building programs and has a clear demarcation between the three two. He has spearheaded his intensive experience in this area to bring to the forefront the essential elements of team building and team coaching. These two concepts are often considered synonymous, but our coach has effectively differentiated between team coaching and team facilitation program.
Team coaching works on acknowledgment, transparency, respect and trust; while team building program is where you work on certain activities to create awareness of teamwork. Alternatively, the team development/facilitation process brings conversation to the table, but that may or may not be towards a common goal, while team coaching is always working towards a common goal founded on 7 building blocks.
Even though these 3 concepts sound similar, yet there are significant differences between the three. Dr Paras’s these 3 ideas have successfully proved to have worked out for several organisational teams. Even though these concepts differ, yet our ICF certified coach can club these three together depending on the requirement of a team.
So, if you want to see yourself as the same, get in touch with Dr Paras at [email protected] Our coach also partners with executives and senior professionals for customized executive coaching programs.
Comments